Automated meat recover off featherbones

22 April 2016
Focus area: Advanced manufacturing
Program stream: Hands-off processing
Project number: 2014-1005
Currently the featherbones are cut off the carcass half as a “rack”, thus consigning any meat in between the featherbones as a lower grade product in terms of economic recovery.

If the featherbones can be cleanly separated or prised off the primal cut, leaving all the meat/gristle/fat behind, then the weight of the adjacent primal cut would be increased by this “recovered” meat.

This R&D Project was to take a close look at this task and to create concepts that might have potential for further development. The final concept would need to support a production method that would be economic based on the value of the recovered meat alone.

Supporting documents

Most recent reports

Previous in this focus area 01 February 2016 Beef spinal cord removal stage 2 process risk and benefits Next in this focus area 16 November 2016 Development of primal cut recognition and localisation software for use in robotic pick and pack sys